There is a reason I call it the everyday curry. Every family has its own recipe and in Indian homes, normally chicken is cooked with spices and a tomato/yogurt/coconut base to make a curry. It is not everyday that we cook or eat curries doused in cupfuls of cream or dyed in food coloring or mellowed down with loads of sugar.

Ingredients

Even if you have bare minimum spices in your rack, you can still turn chicken into this gratifying curry. Utterly delicious and redolent with spices, it is what I cooked for P almost four years back for the first time and he admitted that he could eat hundred rotis (flatbreads) with it.

Though I have been cooking it religiously every week since then, I still try to tweak it. Sometimes I make it more yellowish in color as he likes it, at times I double up the whole spices to spike it up and many times I have mixed in thick coconut milk for a luxurious flavor.Give or take, my husband will polish it off.

That, I guess is the versatile nature of curry, add or skip ingredients at your free will, keep on tasting all the while and in the process develop your own kind – soupy, saucy, spicy, sweet. Curry can mean different to different people, for P its that deep flavored gravy he looks forward to, for mom, it’s the bite of coarse ground spices in the masala, for dad, it needs to be way soupy than the usual.When I make chicken curry for P’s friends it’s the creamy- sweetish kind that they like.

For me, each time I cook and sit down to eat, it’s as if I have plated memories.

However, it disappoints me when I see how the enormous popularity of curry has in fact done it a disfavor. Not only in terms of ingredients but also regards to the effort involved, people find making curry a daunting task and resort to shortcuts, when in real, there aren’t any. I always presume that a good curry needs time and patience. If you are short on any, then probably it’s not your cup of tea.

I posted a picture on facebook and instagram feed few weeks back and many of you asked for the recipe. Since then, I have made Papa’s recipe thrice.With the kind of slow cooking involved, the recipe works best with bone in – dark chicken meat – thighs or drumsticks. Even if you decide to go boneless, opt for dark meat.That said, you can put your slow cooker to good use here.